So the end of Prometheus left a lot of questions unanswered that I was hoping some of you would want to discuss. I'm not sure where to start, so maybe someone else can get the ball rolling. If you haven't seen the movie, stop reading because this will be full of spoilers. Stuff to think about:

Why did the engineers create us only to turn around and want to destroy us.
What is the function of the black goo and why did David give it to Holloway (Try to ignore the fact that you too would probably want to poison Holloway)
Why did the Engineers leave cave paintings and why did they stop visiting (and why show us a map to a remote bioweapons facility)?
What did David say to the Engineer to make him so angry (or would he have been angry regardless of what was said)?

Those are just a few off the top of my head to get things started, but there's so much more

What did David say to the Engineer to make him so angry (or would he have been angry regardless of what was said)?

A couple of thoughts along this line - I'm tempted to think the Engineer wouldn't have been been angry regardless. When he awoke, he seemed to be waiting for someone to say something. He didn't immediately fly into a rage. So it was something about Weyland, Shaw or David's own question/greeting which provoked him.

Also, I was quick to accept the "Engineer returning to Earth to destroy it" premise. But are we really sure that's what was happening? Granted, the Engineer's enraged response seem consistent with that, but we're trusting that David fully understands the Engineer's motives as well as the android's honesty.

I think you will not find your answers, critics have been complaining about plot holes
as if any of the these premises are plausible.

I say just enjoy the movie. As movies go this is a very good and satisfying.

I did attend a lecture with David Lynch, he took questions, someone wanted explanations for Mulholland Drive .
He asked the person what they thought. He replied, " if that works for you, it is correct."

The opening scene, was gorgeous. Who was that 9 ft human?

I'd say he drank a potion that reduced himself down to dna, and then he seeded a planet.
Where was he? When was it?

Well deep, for me, half the fun is discussing the film after the fact. It's not that I need to know the real answers, I just like to talk about the possibilities

Quote:

Originally Posted by deep

The opening scene, was gorgeous. Who was that 9 ft human?

I'd say he drank a potion that reduced himself down to dna, and then he seeded a planet.
Where was he? When was it?

The opening scene was gorgeous! Really drew me into the film. And it was slightly ethereal with the way the spaceship was hovering and exiting the atmosphere.
I thought the opening scene was fairly straight forward though. The 9 foot 'human' was one of the engineers (obviously) and he drank the black liquid to break down his body into its basic parts so that it could recombine and seed life on Earth. He sacrificed his body to create life on another planet (Why? We don't know, but "to create, first you have to destroy"). The scene took place on Earth (or a similar planet, but that's irrelevant because we know that at the very least, something similar happened on Earth) billions of years ago before there was life here.
That then brings up a question about the black goo: Why, when the engineer drinks it, does he body disintegrate whereas when the humans drink it later in the film (and much later chronologically) do they become mutants? I think the answer to that is hinted at in the fact that, in the billions of years since the Engineers seeded the Earth, they haven't evolved physically (Though they seem to have incorporated mechanical parts into their bodies as evidenced by the mechanical looking neck on the Engineer in the final act); They pretty much look exactly the same as they did and even exactly the same from one to another. That suggests that they reproduce asexually and are essentially clones of one another. Perhaps the black goo acts as a mutagen; Perhaps by allowing the new earth dna to mutate, it gives it a better chance of survival on what would be an alien world to the Engineers. Since we modern humans already contain the function for mutating dna, the black goo affects us differently than it does the engineers

I like what Roger Ebert said in the opening sentence of his review - it's "all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers."

Nicely put.
I also really like the concept that our Gods don't even like us and would rather see us all dead. There's something counter intuitive about that in the way it relates to how we throughout history have thought of ourselves. It also seems to have a touch of a Lovecraft-ian outlook (though I could be wrong having not read anything by him ). But isn't one of his overlying premises that ultimate reality is pure suffering and not the sort of paradise or release that we think of as the afterlife? I'm sure I have that somewhat wrong

There are a lot of parallels suggested between the way the crew thinks of David and of androids in general and the way the Engineers think of us. You get the sense that the crew wouldn't think twice about shutting David down if they suspected any kind of devious behaviour. And they talked to him as if he were lower than them. You'd have to guess that the Engineers would think of the humans the exact same way

There are a lot of parallels suggested between the way the crew thinks of David and of androids in general and the way the Engineers think of us. You get the sense that the crew wouldn't think twice about shutting David down if they suspected any kind of devious behaviour. And they talked to him as if he were lower than them. You'd have to guess that the Engineers would think of the humans the exact same way

Absolutely, and David was clearly aware of and affected by their attitude. Almost makes you wonder if that played a part in what he said to the Engineer.

Here's a question I honestly have zero insight on: Is there anything more to the Lawrence of Arabia references? Any parallels? To be honest, I'm not sure if I've ever seen Lawrence of Arabia straight through, so I'd be oblivious to just about any parrallel structure.

Here's a question I honestly have zero insight on: Is there anything more to the Lawrence of Arabia references? Any parallels? To be honest, I'm not sure if I've ever seen Lawrence of Arabia straight through, so I'd be oblivious to just about any parrallel structure.

I'm not sure, but I was wondering the same thing. At the beginning of the film, I got the feeling that David was intentionally taking on a kind of persona that would be comforting to another one of the crew members; He would've known about the crew member's affection for the movie by watching his or her dream; a sort of nefarious way of gaining someone's trust. But that never really came to fruition. There was one scene where he recites a line and the Scottish lady (can't remember her name) reacts. I'll have to watch it again to see if anything else is hinted at with regard to that

I sorta bought into the ship captain's opinion on the subject (by the way, loved how much he looked and acted like Apone from Aliens), particularly after reading the screenwriter's interview. It very well could be that the maps found on Earth of that system were by no means an invitation, it's just that humans took it that way. Also, why did they just randomly decide to go to that planet when they saw a map of a star system? It very well could be that they just flat out chose the wrong place based on what humans think a planet suited for life should be like. It seemed that the black shiznit was a biological weapon which causes a xenomorph type reaction when exposed to animals & humans. I'm not sure if this is or isn't the exact same substance at the first of the movie, as it seems there had been a a xenomorph type reaction in the facility prior to the Prometheus' arrival. Also, in the "storage" room, on the wall there was obviously a carving specifically of what appeared to the xenomorph / aliens we're familiar with, so it seems to me that the Engineers knew what that substance did.

Being a huge fan of Alien and Aliens, there were so many awesome fanboy moments for me in this. When they first saw the outline of the ship underneath the "mound" on their sensors, I had a big smile. When they walked into the storage room, and the canisters were lined up like the eggs in Alien and Aliens, more smiles. When you see the carving of a xenomorph looking creature on the wall, bigger smile. My absolute favorite fanboy moment, when the Engineer hops into the cockpit, and that huge gun looking control deal comes rising up, I nearly started clapping. (For those who don't know, you see an engineer sitting in that exact same cockpit control deal in its elephant looking spacesuit with a hole in its chest in the ship in the first Alien movie.)

Side note, Ridley Scott really doesn't like the idea of robots / androids, does he?

Got side tracked, and realized I never actually threw in my "theories". I sorta assume the Engineers created humans and Earth just as a testing ground to try out their "weapon". We were nothing special, they saw us the same as rats in a lab.

I could be very wrong on that though. Perhaps we killed or tried to fight the Engineers, and they decided to wipe us out. Maybe we didn't evolve like they wanted us to. Who knows.